Ready to cancel Netflix? Take this test first

Is Netflix worth $16 a month? That’s the question on many people’s minds after the company announced its pricing changes on Tuesday. Existing Netflix customers have until Sept. 1 to decide whether they want to swallow a price increase of 60 percent to enjoy both DVDs and instant streaming or ditch either of these offerings and downgrade to an $8 plan for one or the other.

Many enraged customers are threatening to cancel Netflix altogether, while others are contemplating whether they’ll get more use out of the company’s DVD-by-mail service or online video catalog. Luckily, there’s a pretty easy way to find out: Feedfliks makes it possible to analyze your past Netflix usage behavior, telling you exactly how many titles you stream per month and how long you’ve been keeping those DVDs at home on average before sending them back.

Netflix will now ask you whether you want to give Feedfliks access to your Netflix account. Note: The image used to confirm this is currently broken, but don’t worry: Feedliks uses OAuth to communicate with Netflix, so the site will never get to see your Netflix password. Go ahead and click on that broken image link (you can always deauthorize access to your account later in your Netflix account settings).

Feedfliks will then start to pull data about your past viewing behavior from Netflix’s servers. This process may be interrupted by an encouragement to subscribe to Feedfliks. Simply ignore this for now by clicking on the take me to my page link at the bottom of the page with that lists premium features.

Feedfliks will now show you exactly how many DVDs you’ve rented in the last year, how long it took you to return them and how many titles you have been streaming per week. It also tries to calculate how much you pay per movie, but this data is based on old pricing plans, so you can safely ignore this.

Instead, why not make your own back-of-the-envelope calculation: Getting DVDs from Netflix will cost you $8 starting September. Given your past history, is it worth the money? How about streaming?

I did this test myself yesterday and was surprised to learn that I only rented 16 DVDs in the last 12 months. Paying close to $100 per year seems a little steep for this, especially considering I could have gotten the same movies for $2 to $4 a pop from Amazon’s VOD service. It looks like I’ll be switching to streaming-only, which I’ve been using a lot more: Feedfliks shows that I’m watching around 22 titles per month online.